“Toward Conceptual Networks in Brain: Decoding Imagined Words from Word Reading”, 2021-12-11 (; similar):
Language is an epiphenomenon of human’s subjective world which is noted as the conceptual network. Human beings realized communication of knowledge, experience, and symbolic entity of subjective psyche, across time and space by language which included but not limited to spoken or writing systems. From the perspective of computational linguistics, one concept in the conceptual network would be identically activated despite variations of modalities (ie. comprehension, generation or production).
In the current study, we conducted a semantic-access word reading task (language comprehension) and a word imagining task (language generation) in Chinese native speakers during fMRI scanning. Part-of-speech category and lexicon of stimuli in word imagining task were predicted by brain responses in the word reading task.
Importantly, our learning model, which was trained from brain activation of word reading, achieved decoding both imagined words and semantically transferred imagined words.
To our knowledge, this is the first report of cross-modality and semantics transferring decoding of imagined speech. Given the huge processing discrepancies between language comprehension and generation, our results demonstrated a stable conceptual network in the human brain and flexible access from linguistic ways to conceptual network, which shed light on understanding brain mechanisms of the relationship between language and thought.